The global struggle for democracy is in Ukraine

SUSAN STOKES 

7th March 2022

Russia’s military assault on Ukraine caps a period of political attacks on democracy around the world.

Not 2022 but 2014—the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv against independent Ukraine being pulled into Russian ‘Eurasian’ tutelage

 (Ввласенко, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Faced with Russia’s authoritarian kleptocracy to their north and east, Ukrainians—off and on, and with periodic mass uprisings—have chosen a very different political path in recent decades. Through several cycles of elections and popular protest, Ukraine has moved toward the democratic ideals of the rule of law, protection of individual liberties, freedom of expression and association, free and fair elections and the peaceful resolution of internal conflicts.

Today, international organisations classify Ukraine as a less-than-full—but aspiring—democracy. Russia and Ukraine’s divergent paths—the ever-tightening dictatorship of the Russian president Vladimir Putin versus Ukraine’s sometimes-chaotic open society—made the Kremlin’s recent invasion more likely.

One of the key differences between autocracies and democracies is that democracies protect the rights of free speech and assembly, and hence of popular protest. As citizens of democracies know, some regulation of protests is necessary to keep the peace and sometimes this regulation goes too far, preventing these rights from being exercised.

But dictatorships, such as Putin’s, simply cannot tolerate protests—at least of the sort that criticise the government. The Kremlin is now threatening Russians demonstrating against the war in Ukraine with ‘harsh punishment’ for organising ‘mass riots’. On Friday, Russia’s Putin-controlled parliament passed a law that would impose 15-year-maximum prison sentences on those who ‘falsify’ information about the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.

Autocrats are also more likely to inflict physical harm on protesters. In fact, an earlier violent crackdown in Kyiv was the prologue to the eventual removal of Ukraine’s last pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014. In an attempt to placate pro-western constituencies in Ukraine, Yanukovych flirted with the European Union, announcing in 2013 that his government would sign an Association Agreement with the EU. But in late November 2013, under pressure from Putin, he abruptly turned away from the EU and instead signalled a preference for joining the proposed Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union.

Stunned by Yanukovych’s move, demonstrators converged on Kyiv’s Maidan (Independence) Square. In the early hours of November 30th, a small group of protesters were lingering alongside municipal workers who were mounting a Christmas tree, when a contingent from the Berkut (‘Golden Eagle’) special police force suddenly appeared, attacking the protesters and workers with boots and batons. The violence against peaceful demonstrators, ordered by Yanukovych, was unusual for Ukraine at the time.

Images of bloodied young people being pushed into police vehicles sparked an enormous outpouring of anger and more than half a million demonstrators were estimated to have packed into central Kyiv on December 1st. This was the beginning of the ‘Euromaidan’ protests, which culminated in February 2014 with Yanukovych fleeing Ukraine into self-exile in Russia. Putin recently alluded to these events in a speech justifying the current onslaught on Ukraine, claiming in Orwellian language that Yanukovych had been ousted in a ‘coup’.

Democratic backsliders

Putin’s physical assault on Ukraine caps a period of political attacks on democracy around the world. Many of the assailants have been elected leaders who, like Yanukovych, have taken aim at their own countries’ constitutions and encroached on citizens’ basic rights. Aspiring autocrats have followed this playbook in countries as diverse as Brazil, Venezuela and Nicaragua; Hungary, Poland and Serbia; and Turkey, the Philippines and the United States.

These democratic backsliders have leaned on one another for support, forming an implicit alliance. The former United States president, Donald Trump, was one of its linchpins and worked hard to bolster like-minded leaders—including by offering them a coveted visit to the White House. Trump clearly demonstrated his preferences in 2019 by hosting Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, while demanding that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, pay his way to Washington by initiating legal proceedings against Trump’s then-potential rival for the presidency, Joe Biden.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shattered this unholy alliance of aspiring autocrats, which viewed Putin as the ultimate strongman leader. Orbán has denounced the invasion, while Poland is accepting a flood of Ukrainian refugees. Both Hungary and Poland have new reason to value their membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Let us therefore hope that Putin’s aggression restores a sense of common purpose among free societies, and persuades would-be autocrats that peace, security and national survival are well worth the price of admission into the democratic club. There, citizens’ rights and freedoms will have a better chance of being respected.

Republication forbidden—copyright Project Syndicate 2022, ‘The global struggle for democracy is in Ukraine’



SUSAN STOKES is professor of political science and director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago.

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There is no way back. [Part 1]
If we want the war to stay in Ukraine, we have to win it in Ukraine.


Molly McKew
Mar 6,2022

This is part 1 of a three-part series on changing our approach to the war in Ukraine.

Part 1 argues that there is no way to return to “normal” with Putin, and looks at how and why we must change our thinking on the risk/opportunity calculus we are getting so wrong.

Part 2 looks at the considerable opportunity that Ukraine is forging for us — at the different, better future we might have if we are brave enough to take it.

Part 3 will look at what can be done in short order to help Ukraine win.

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A railway bridge in Vasylivka destroyed by the Russian army. (Photo credit: Svidomi Media)

Day 11

If we want the war with Putin to end, we must see why the Ukrainians have defied all expectations — as a government, as an army, as a nation, as a people — and learn to think as they do. We must learn to see not only the risk, but the opportunities that are born from taking those risks that would otherwise not have existed.

We see now the Russian war machine is hollow, and that their war planning is founded on delusion. Again, this creates more opportunity. They are second guessing themselves in the face of Ukrainian resolve. But we talk as if the war is essentially over.

Since the first boom, Ukrainian strategic decision-making was actually about looking for victory — which technically is what strategy is for; strategy is a theory of success in war — and about creating opportunity for something other than just dying quietly in the mud and the rubble. This has given them an incalculable advantage over Russia. And honestly, over us.

We haven’t caught up yet. We desperately need to.

* * * * *

This week — as Putin’s war in Ukraine moved toward a third week; as Russian forces in Ukraine switched to pummeling civilian areas with air strikes and heavy artillery because Putin has never paid a price for violating the rules of war; as Putin’s strategy of trying to force Ukraine to submit via organized terror advanced; as Putin reminded us that his intention is to erase Ukraine entirely — there was still this pretty typical wrong-thinking discussion of what must be done by the West. About how we must “give Putin a win” so he will relent, about how Putin “the trapped rat” must be left with “some way out.”

As Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said the war in Ukraine will continue “until the end;” as French President Macron, after a conversation where Putin said he will “demilitarize” all of Ukraine by force, warned “the worst is yet to come;” as Ukrainian President Zelensky warned, “they all have orders to erase our history, erase our country, erase us all;” as Putin once again made a range of threats against Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic states — it was clear that far, far too many people are still locked in thinking that there must be a way back to when there wouldn’t be perpetual hot conflict with Putin’s Russia.

So let me just be clear here.

There is no way back now. Not with Putin. Not for Putin.

There is no way back.

No way back to the usual look-away stalemate with Putin, where excuses remain to blame the targets of his revanchism instead of him — instead of the spaces we leave open for him to walk into. No way back to pretending we don’t incentivize the breaking of the rules that we insist must be the basis for our own “restraint.” No way back to pretending this doesn’t have a bodycount attached.

No way back to believing there isn’t a “next” on the list as the Kremlin continues to search for the line where we will stop them. No way back to pretending our mindset on Russia is achieving the objectives we need.

No way back to when four generations of Ukrainians had not had to rise up to fight for their lives and every inch of their land — fearless, peerless, tireless, and full of spirit — while hoping every day that help would come, help would come.

No way back to when Europe had not been fundamentally reordered by this Ukrainian bravery, some ways of which are obvious, and some which we are just beginning to glimpse. To when America didn’t feel another step more remote across the ocean.

No way back to before this inflection point, this fulcrum — the onward outcomes of which we are still trying to shape with inadequate imagination. There is no way back to believing our unchanged mindset on Russia is giving us any advantage in how events unfold.

No way back to knowing that everything that comes next wasn’t paid for with Ukrainian blood.

* * * * *

(Photo posted by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense)

Those who project Ukraine’s fall as a forgone conclusion — as the inevitable conclusion, they say, that would always have been once Putin set himself on this course — I think they still imagine there is a return to what was before, once Ukraine is done dying — as long as we don’t interfere in the process too much. That somehow, this is the wisest course given how things are supposed to work.

But there is no “just let him have Ukraine.”

It’s easy to listen to euphemisms like “Putin is trying to destroy Ukrainian democracy,” and quite another to understand this means destroying Ukraine and killing as many Ukrainians as needed to get them to submit. Now, we have the visuals to match his words.

If our policy is to stay in our safe warm house and watch this slaughter through the window, toasting our newfound unity — then we have already accepted that it is Putin who defines us, not ourselves. We have already accepted the parameters of defeat.

Ukrainians are stopping tanks with their bodies and their hands, overwhelming potential occupiers with just the sheer presence of their numbers and “go f*ck yourself” attitude, while we are concerned about the legalese of transferring fighter jets to Ukraine, fighter jets that would mean less Ukrainians die. These paper shields will not protect us from the mortal moral wounds we will be dealt for having failed to act.

As for “once the dying is done” — after the wartime slaughter will be the “peacetime” slaughter. Those kill lists, the purge lists that we know the Russians have made because we leaked that we have them. Are we prepared not to do anything about that too? When the Maidan activists that we have feted in our capitals are rounded up and disappeared — will there also be nothing we can do?

The trap of doing nothing requires constant renewal — each day, you must renew your vow to inaction, move further away from what was right and find yourself defending more ardently what you know to be wrong.

The Cold Warriors call this “restraint.” I just think it is a total lack of imagination.

I know many people disagree with me. But to some extent, we are all trying to use the evidence of absence to make our case.

For the last 15 years, the United States has gotten the calculus of Russia wrong. The Cold War restraint model doesn’t work against the thoroughly unconventional opponent we face. Policymakers and decision-makers admit this when discussing the moments when Putin has tested us since 2007. In hindsight, they all say, we never did enough. But there has been a low cost to us for continuing on without reevaluation, because mostly, we aren’t the ones to pay the price for those errors.

Now, the restrainers say Ukraine will die no matter what. If we act, they say, Ukraine will probably die faster. This is back to the tired of framing of “anything you do to stop Putin makes it worse.” This is a trap that I — and the people I have worked with and learned from — have never had the luxury of believing. It may make total sense from the distant theoretical world of “what to do about Russia.” It makes no sense at all in any of the frontline states.

My experience in the past 14 years, working in countries under various forms of attack from Russia and studying Russian actions in Syria and elsewhere, is exactly the opposite of “doing anything makes it worse.” It is not escalation that invites poor judgement or expands the potential for miscalculation/disaster by the supposedly cornered rat of Putin, but the empty space we leave before the Russians, into which they feel free to strike, when the worst moments of catastrophe come. The danger is not in action from us, action that comes with clear purpose or clearly articulated purpose, but in failing to act and leaving Putin to believe a greater risk taken yields greater rewards — and thus is worth taking.

The very best example of this is Ukraine. The doomsaying on what would happen when the Russian war machine came — the machine rebooted by the Georgian war, retrained in the trenches of eastern Ukraine and the skies and dust of Syria and on all the seas between — shredded upon impact because Ukrainians actually fought full-on from that first minute. Russian forces met a hard surface, and the whole illusion started to come apart. Resistance was not futile. Fighting for every inch mattered. Not just to show us what could be done, but to keep the Russians from easily reaching their objectives, and to create opportunities for strategic victory.

Not incidentally, this is similar to what the Estonians have always told us about the doomsaying about them — that the numbers on the paper could not account for how much standing orders to resist would matter.

Perhaps reorienting toward understanding outcomes and opportunity will help us escape from the endlessly circular thinking of “not giving Putin what he wants.” What Putin wants is a war with NATO, say the restrainers, so we can’t do anything because it would give him that war. Conversely, though, Putin also wants NATO to look weak and feckless, so in not standing up to him, we also give him what he wants. All of this is nonsense because it is focused only on Putin, and not on our own concept of how to shape outcomes or even articulate a strategy for victory of our own.

I say if we act, we can help deal Putin a strategic defeat in Ukraine. The form that takes is largely dependent on the Ukrainians and the tools we can get into their hands in time. I say that we have never had a similar opportunity to do so, and that we should respect the choice of the Ukrainians to act on it.

Or do you imagine that we will ever have a better chance to defeat Putin than with an army of 10 million Ukrainians willing to pay the butcher’s bill on our behalf?

* * * * *
\

Bridge destroyed by Ukrainian forces in Kalynivka, and a Russian tank destroyed in the explosion 

(photo posted by @UAWeapons)

The White House and its amplifiers continue to frame everything in the context of avoiding any direct confrontation of Putin in a battle space. It’s the imagined escalation of direct confrontation —> war between the US and Russia —> WWIII —> inevitable nuclear confrontation. Putin knows this, and mentions nukes at least twice a week to keep everyone in their assigned boxes.

We think only of limited war while he operates without restraint. We give him total sanctuary while we have none. He assumes the honor on which our alliance depends is actually a weakness — and sometimes, we allow him to make it so.

In an analysis presented to a Lithuanian defense forum in 2019, Lukas Milevski (of Leiden University) discussed how the defense of the Baltic states from a Russian attack would be a war of honor for NATO — a war that would test whether we would live up to our alliance commitments to defend Baltic freedom and sovereignty. What would success be, in this situation, for the Russians? That there would be no military pressure on Russia; that they could choose how and where to attack; that NATO is on defense only; that we allow it to becomes a conflict of endurance and a test of whether Russian political will or Western honor give out first.

This has been much on my mind as we see what plays out in Ukraine. Yes, I understand the hard line the White House keeps repeating: that Ukraine is not NATO and thus we have no alliance pledge to defend them. But nonetheless, this has rapidly come to resemble the Baltic defense scenario, and has rapidly become a test of Russian political will versus the value of our honor.

We can lock ourselves in whatever box of our own devising. Putin has already said what we are doing makes us a participant to the conflict. But he hasn’t acted. Because he has absolutely no interest at all in running his straw man army into a buzzsaw of American steel. This was a dynamic we saw consistently in Syria — Russian forces and mercenaries went out of their way to avoid US forces (beyond showy airmanship and other silly displays), because when fighting broke out between them, it ended very badly for the Russians. There was no World War III.

We can end this nightmare of giving things to Putin by understanding: if we truly want the war to stay in Ukraine, we have to win it in Ukraine. Stop not just his invasion of Ukraine, but the bigger war against all the rest of us, too.

* * * * *

Ukrainian civilians block the road in Enerhodar to prevent Russian forces from reaching a nuclear power plant

 (photo posted by the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

If we want the war with Putin to end, we must see why the Ukrainians have defied all expectations. We must learn to think as they do. We must learn to see not only the risk, but the opportunities that are born from taking those risks that would otherwise not have existed.

A good example of escaping the cage of risk avoidance (or, opportunity blindness) in our thinking: when US intelligence saw that killing Zelensky or forcing him out would be a core goal of the Russian invasion, we told him to leave. Leave before the war, leave once the war had started, leave, just leave. So de facto, our advice to Zelensky was: “The Russians want you gone, we think you should leave.” Speaking of giving the Russians what they want. Zelensky has clearly said no.

Now, I doubt those offering this advice did so to deliver a core strategic objective to the Kremlin by getting Zelensky to leave. By our logic, it was to preserve his life, to preserve command and control during the war, to preserve statehood continuity when Ukraine was overcome. WHEN, of course, Ukraine fell. This was the wisest (meaning most risk-averse) recommendation we could provide.

Zelensky rejected that the end of Ukraine was the only outcome. By staying, he rallied his nation to fight for its survival. By staying, he created potential outcomes, possibilities, that did not exist before. By staying, he showed that there were rewards that overcame by far the risks that were the only thing we could see. By staying, he showed why it matters to stand up to Putin.

Ukraine survived the first days, the pipeline opened, and lethal aid began to arrive. Their epitaph was retracted, they got more time, survived more days, opened more possibilities. Russia is taking losses — no, not enough, not yet, but more than they would have, more than anyone thought possible. We see the hollow war machine, and the war planning premised on their own smoke and mirrors. Again, this creates more opportunity. The Russians are second guessing themselves, trying new lines of effort — always against the unwavering Ukrainian resolve.

Ukrainian strategic decision-making defined what victory was for them. Defined success in war. It created opportunity for survival; it created opportunity for Russian defeat. They now have the advantage over Russia — and over us. We don’t even understand what they are doing because we refuse to accept that what we are seeing works at all. And the opportunity they are trying to force us to see is about so much more than Russia.

[What this full opportunity looks like, I will examine in Part 2]

* * * * *

Zelensky’s March 4th speech to crowds gathered in 7 foreign cities, denouncing NATO’s decision not to enact a no fly zone.

“Putin wants chaos” has been a theme of our assessments the past 5 years — but often presented decoupled from the second aspect of that, which is the belief that chaos is an environment in which Russia has advantage because they are willing to take risks and absorb failures, and, if they stay focused on core strategic objectives, they can move through the chaos better and more ably than their opponents.

The Ukrainians have honed this practice and applied it with far greater clarity of purpose. They are fighting for something that actually matters.

And we have a glimpse of the cornered rat — not as the rat about to launch a nuclear weapon at us, but a rat looking for hole to escape through.

* * * * *

There have been so many lies from Putin these last months — many of which the White House has been quick to expose and neuter.

But the greatest lie Putin has ever sold us — ensnared us with — is the idea that our hands are tied against him. That there is nothing to be done. That he must win to abandon the infliction of more violence, more terror, more pain — even though allowing him to do so entails violence and terror and pain. That he is more dangerous when confronted than when he is allowed to nibble away at us from the shadows.

The risk this White House sees is that “confronting Putin means war with Russia,” and they frame everything through this lens of risk without seeing any opportunity.

Russia articulates quite clearly that they are at war with us already, and they have been for some time. Their primary interest — and why they have resorted to so many grey and below-threshold methods of attack in between whatever kinetic wars they think they can get away with — is that we never feel sufficient activation energy to fight them. A component of this has been constructing the trap of believing that there is nothing to be done. That inaction is always wisdom.

It is not. It is the trap. As Zelensky terms it — self-hypnosis. There are miles of things to do between direct US confrontation of Russia and where we are now [this will be discussed in part 3]. If there is too much risk in a no fly zone, for example, don’t just say no — imagine alternatives. Instead this job is left to the Ukrainians and their loose network of individual allies. The White House is now being dragged along by the Ukrainians, by some of our European allies, by the new zingier Europe — but too slowly, too slowly. This course creates more danger for what Russia might do — the space left open — not less.

The White House chooses to focus on — and focus us on — the risk of nuclear conflict. This is choosing to evade some future bogeyman instead of fight the guy with the knife right in front of you.

And there is other risk they are choosing not to see because they don’t see the opportunities that might be squandered.

They are choosing not to see the risk of failing to show up in full measure to support the right side in a just war.

They are choosing not to see the risk that we face when Europe has leapt ahead, and they view us as trailing behind and holding them back from averting atrocity. When the Europeans want more sanctions, and we urge caution — and now industry — industry!! — is self-sanctioning and clearing out of Dodge because of the reputational risk of remaining a beneficiary of Russia — well, it’s not hard to see who will be blamed.

They are choosing not to see the risk of the potential fissures emerging within the Alliance between those states stepping up and being creative to get defensive aid to Ukraine, and those who are hanging back. And what that might morph into in the future.

They are choosing not to see the risk of Ukraine falling, and the butterfly effect it will have across absolutely everything.

They are choosing not to see the risk of Ukraine surviving in defiance of us as well as of Putin, if we stand aside — the risk of proving we are everything the Kremlin has always argued us to be.

They do not see the risk of missing this moment for a different future with Russia. Right now, we know it only gets worse.

They are choosing not to see the risk and fragility of the future where we stood aside. Where we have done nothing, did nothing, as Putin erased Ukraine from the map. Where no rules are left, and all the nice cool logic of restraint meant absolutely nothing in the end, because Putin was willing to do whatever is necessary to end Ukraine, and we were still operating from a mindset of thinking this somehow made sense?

This White House, which was so eager to explain their new thinking to exposing the Russian playbook in the run-up to the war, seems to have lost the courage of conviction when it comes to bringing fresh thinking to the war itself. Beginning to rally the West, rethinking intra-NATO defense posture, providing arms, these new tactics to take advantage in the information domain away from the standard Russian efforts — why stop looking for new tactics to the right of the boom? Caught off guard in the information war, the trapped rat did not strike; it basically slunk off and found something else to do, and it’s never recovered its advantage. There are so many lessons there beyond the one we have taken — lessons that apply outside the digital realm.

We didn’t start the war. But it was always about us. The collective us of free nations of which Ukraine is now firmly a part, and a leader. About the imaginary enemy that we are for Putin. About putting us in our place. About refreshing our belief that we can do nothing against him.

We didn’t start the war. But Russia is at war with us already.

And we have to end it. We can end it in Ukraine. We can end it for Ukraine. We can end it with Ukraine.

* * * * *

In Nikolaev, Russian prisoners are held at the monument of the liberators of the city (photo posted by Igor Girkin)

In an online discussion this week, historian Timothy Snyder described the opportunity Ukraine is giving us this way (greatly condensed here for space considerations, but I encourage you to listen to the whole discussion yourself):

I have this feeling that every day that Ukrainians resist is giving us another year or another decade of the kind of life we are used to having. Every day that they fight magnifies outwards and gives us a chance to reflect and affirm and to act on our own.

Freedom is all about…becoming a personal force yourself… History is also made by us… Freedom is a value…and it has to be affirmed, sometimes with risk taking, by us. We must resist notions of fate.

Ukrainians have been helping us to imagine how things could be different… If there is going to be a positive outcome, that positive outcome will have to do with Ukrainians helping us to think out our way into multiple better futures.

There is no way back.

But imagine the world if we save Ukraine. Imagine the century that we might have then.

Part 2, to be posted soon, looks at the multiple, better futures that Ukrainian bravery and sacrifice are making possible for us.

— MM

There is no way back. [Part 1] - Great Power

 Looking At Russia-Ukraine Is Like Thinking About The Still-Missing Malaysian MH370 Airplane: Who Has The Truth? – Essay

 March 7, 2022 

By Dr. Azly Rahma

Last week I wrote these notes as I was thinking of the world, in preparation for a lecture on Sustainability, Human Rights, and Peace and Justice.  I wanted to also read the mind of political journalists as they take sides reporting, as they interrogate their subjectivities, question their biases, and acknowledge their human-ness and their idea of “what-am-I-objective-against?”, and as their stories paid by the pied piper residing in corporations or the State. Unless they have their own forum independent of these controls, and they answer only to their souls.

So, my notes are essentially philosophical and in the next section, I present the Marxist dimension of writing, the “cui-bono” (who-benefits?) notion, and how as a case study can be applied to the still-missing Malaysian airline MH370.

Random Notes on Ukraine

WE CAN NEVER KNOW the truth about Russia-Ukraine. Who is right? Or wrong. Truth: We can only take sides based on what is told.

IF EUROPE SENDS PEOPLE to fight in Ukraine, it will be a bloody mess. Prelude to World War III. Putin knows Machiavelli well.

LEARN TO ANALYZE ISSUES like blind men and an elephant. Only this time the eyes of the blind are now wide open. Kaleidoscopic.

“TRUTH” How we construct this depends on the method we use. Truth and Method. How we see things depends on how we view ourselves.

TRUTH. One cannot see God, therefore use metaphors, personification, semiotics of representation. Creations abound, hence.

TRUTH. Sociological paradigms – Structural Functionalism, Critical Theory, Symbolic Interactionism. Now limiting. Need new way.

TRUTH. All the more subjective now. Post-truth. Pseudo-truth. New versions emerge. TRUTH is personal, elusive.

TRUTH. We live by metaphors. Organizations by those too. Cultural perspectives matter in seeing through “truth”.

TRUTH. Invasion of Ukraine might not be an invasion after all. From multivariate-alternate perspective.

TRUTH. In an age of everchanging complexity of media and production of its artifacts of perception-crafting, truth disappears.

TRUTH. What matters existentially, is the truth of one’s existence & how psycho-socio-neurology within functions in crafting truth.

TRUTH. In the life of our mind, why must we consume other people’s truth — about religion, God, politics, fate and free will?

TRUTH? Not just a concept ideologized, but production of consciousness-manipulating neurons that become us.

TRUTH? We are truth within ourselves. Unto us. But necessary to step outside of this realm to see the truth from a vantage point.

TRUTH. Not a question of “what is REALITY”. Rather, how real is real? A philosophical theme of inquiry.

TRUTH. Platonic Theory of Forms attempts to illuminate the truth and perception and reality problematique.

TRUTH. Of the religious scriptures. Are they alive? Or words read to be made alive? Hence, “living words”? Complex notion.

TRUTH. Do we read the world? Or let the world read and write us, inscribing our consciousness with externalities of “truth”?

TRUTH. Is reality. Is language. Is consciousness. These are complex concepts in themselves. Hence the existential issue of language.

Still, where is MH370 – the Malaysian airplane?

Towards looking at Ukraine I remember what I wrote on Malaysia’s missing airplane.

The following is based on a minor-edited version of my analysis:

Thinking of the still-missing Malaysian airplane, contemplating on a Marxist theory of informational diffusion, I came up with these random notes on media oligopoly I am sharing in this week’s column:

Information wants to be free and wishes to leave the shackle of control and the kingdom of officialdom.

Marx once said that whoever owns the means of production owns/controls (re: Vladimir Lenin’s classic essay on ‘commanding heights’,) and control the production of consciousness, and further controls the evolution of the act of knowing and the contents of what is to be known because what is known is produced as artifacts with politics of control structuring them.

CNN, the media empire of Rupert Murdoch, Time-Warner AOL, and media corporations controls the production of what is to be known, albeit appearing to be producing “objectivity” hidden under the shibboleth of “liberal-democracy” whilst in essence governed by the hegemony of the tightly-controlled news and informational oligarchic empire of consciousness-production.

This might sound like a (Noam) Chomskyian analysis of the post-modern, post-information age paradigm of media production re: the reporting of the missing MH370. It could as well be a Chomskyian view in need of a further work of deconstructionism.

There are classes of control of knowledge-production and those producing information in the ongoing reporting of MH370.

Level 1:

Those who know the whereabouts of the aircraft, such as leaders of the game, such as presidents and prime ministers playing the role of ‘chief-of-staff of armed forces’, etc. in collaboration with the warrior-commander-Kshatriya class and the most elite of the intelligence unit and working in tandem and alliance with military and supra-intelligence allies, the secret must be kept (from Edward Snowden or Julian Assange) as long as the national and international security is safeguarded – the plot must be kept intact and the show must go on…

Level 2:

Those who know the “unsealed part of the story” will be playing the role of making sure the world and the public know what’s happening, in the name of freedom to know and freedom to profit from conflict or even the manufacture of conflict. The philosophy of news reporting is simple: live and breathe the paradigm of liberal-capitalist informational democracy through sound-bite and blitzkrieg- technologies of cognitive dissonance and funnel in as much as possible issues versus non-issues and speculations and half-truths to feed the four-eyed viewers who are starved for information and drowned in speculations.

That’s the role of the media, whether in America or in Malaysia. The longer one gets glued to the TV, the higher the ratings, the more big advertisers will pour in money.

But the media will only be allowed to view a certain amount of secrecy.

CNN will not talk about speculations that the US government and its media and military ideological apparatuses know what is happening and perhaps instead the focus will be on the incompetency (rightly so…) of the Malaysian government in handling this with her bumbling and fumbling technology and techniques of handling security (again, rightly so… with all these flip-flops, contradictory statements, and true-false vacillation of official reporting, and those elusive and informational-hide-and-seek-and-peekaboo type of reporting we hear since day one of the mystery unfolding.

That’s what the media is good at and will profit from. To report on speculations that the army or the government is perhaps involved in a huge cover-up will not be good – it will mean a media kamikaze of epic instant death proportions.

CNN will report on the human side of the story, bringing in expert after expert, lullabying viewers with a thesis-antithesis-synthesis fiesta of media party and focus on by the minute day-to-day coverage of the search for an object in many vast oceanic haystacks… the rescuers and commanders of the search and rescue and recovery team do not have access to the “sealed information” on what actually happened and what is still happening

The sealed information lies with those in Level 1 above. Those searching are committed to their search and doing their job for the country and for the family and in the name of solving a most mind-boggling mystery (although Google Earth can photograph your car’s plate number from outer space).

From the point of view of revenue generation, the longer the search, the more each team can charge the Malaysian government. As of today (when this article was written) the United States has spent an equivalent of perhaps US$5 million to be billed to the Malaysian government sooner or later.

Level 3:

Of the owners of knowledge of what happened to MH370 are the classes of people who had consumed the information produced by those in Level 2.

In essence, there is both chaos and structure, and complexity and simplicity in the way we understand the kaleidoscopic and fractal nature of informational flow.

And who would Marx pronounce as the winner in this informational war, a Mahabharata of media mayhem of the construction of reality?

Not human beings. But technology. Media technology. Manipulated by the Military-Industrial Complex. The Frankenstein of our Orwellian World of 1984 inhabited by members of the Animal Farm.

Welcome to our global village.

***

That was my Chaos Theory-inspired analysis of the missing airplane.

How do we look at the Russian-Ukraine issue then?  

In other words, as an educator teaching about global issues, do I take sides when the information will never be enough for me to have an informed opinion, and that my job is to make my students think and teach them how to think and not what to think, as the American pragmatic philosopher John Dewey would suggest – how do I do this while still remain a human being with philosophical sensibilities as exemplified by the questions I had at the beginning of this writing?

Herein lie the idea of teaching students how to “look at a butterfly” flapping its wings in the Amazon jungle some 100 years ago, and using scientific thinking discern the nature of global issues and world politics, taking into consideration the kaleidoscopic, multidimensional, fractal-geometric nature of events unfolding and how these have their origins which have origins and origins ad nauseum!

I suppose that is how we ought to look at the Russian-Ukraine issue and explore alternate and multivariate perspectives. From the philosophical, ideological, political-economic, strategic, leader-ego-centric, and of course geopolitical-strategic issues. Complex interlocking-directorateship of ideas we need to untangle and yet we will never find the right answer. We can only accept ones that will be comforting to us.

Could this be the reason why the United States primarily have not decided to declare war on Russia and instead, in the meantime plan to beef up NATO with arms (as a lucrative business of the US military-industrial-complex) and to be fair, to avoid a situation as such as Kennedy’s Cuban Missile Crisis?

I don’t know. As Socrates would say.

Because Vladimir Putin is a realist.

As real as the literary approaches of Tolstoy and Pushkin and Solzhenitsyn.

As real as Lenin.

And Stalin.

Dr. Azly Rahman is an academician, educator, international columnist, and author of nine books He holds a Columbia University (New York City) doctorate in international education development and Master's degrees in six areas: education, international affairs, peace studies, communication, fiction, and non-fiction writing. He is a member of the Columbia University chapter of the Kappa Delta Pi International Honor Society in Education. Twitter @azlyrahman. More writings here. His latest book, a memoir, is published by Penguin Books is available here.

THUMBNAIL Malaysia's MH370 in 2011 photo by Laurent ERRERA, Wikipedia Commons.

In Odesa, opera singers and perfumers seek to defend city from Russian destruction

MARCH 7, 2022

Volunteers in the city of Odessa, on March 6.

IGOR TKACHENKO/

The opera singers are filling sandbags from Odesa’s famed beaches, the local yacht club director is organizing deliveries of barbed wire and a perfumer is cleaning out shops of leftover Soviet fabric to use for bulletproof vests.
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Odesa, the city whose grand edifices on the Black Sea stand as a cosmopolitan testament to Viennese, Italian and Russian architects, has been largely spared from the aerial bombardments and artillery attacks that have turned streets in other Ukrainian cities to rubble.

But on Sunday, the lengthy wail of air raid sirens was followed by an announcement from the military that it had shot down a Russian aircraft near the city – and, then, a grim warning from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
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“They are preparing to bombard Odesa,” Mr. Zelensky said. Such an act, he warned, would constitute not just a war crime, but a crime against history. Odesa has long been revered by Russians, built on land seized from the Turks by Catherine the Great, with cobblestone streets once frequented by Alexander Pushkin and sweeping beaches that have long drawn legions of Russian tourists.

Before troops under Russian President Vladimir Putin began a campaign that has destroyed Ukrainian cities, few believed it was possible for invading forces to desecrate Odesa. Mr. Putin, they believed, would not dare sully what was once a jewel of the Russian empire.

Now, such an outcome is taken as a given.

Russian troops have already ruined much of Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine.

“It’s also a Russian-speaking city and beloved by Russians – and we see that it has just been wiped from the Earth,” said Albert Kabakov, director of the Black Sea Yacht Club. “I’m sure,” he said, that Mr. Putin is prepared to do the same to Odesa.

Russian warships and landing craft already came so close to the city last Thursday that they were visible to anyone with a view of the sea, a tangible portent of doom.

And so Odesans have spent days in feverish preparation, an effort that has swept together people from all walks of life.

Shortly after the Feb. 24 missile strikes that marked the beginning of war, Mr. Kabakov started co-ordinating an effort to stuff the city’s sandy beaches into bags. For more than a week, volunteers have descended on the shoreline, some bringing supplies, others offering hot meals – and many more lending their backs to the manufacture of 300,000 sandbags.

Still others brought their own vehicles – BMW X5s, semi-trucks and many others – to ferry the sandbags to some of the city’s most treasured places. Mr. Kabakov has also organized deliveries of barbed wire and concrete blocks to places that need fortifications. Beaches that could prove attractive landing sites have been mined.

And large protective embankments of sandbags and anti-tank “hedgehog” defenses have now been installed at the Odesa National Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet, on Derybasivska Street – the pedestrian walkway that forms the heart of the city – and around monuments to Catherine the Great and the Duke of Richelieu.

“I would be ready to work for even 100 days to protect our city,” said Andrey Harlamov, a bass soloist at the opera house. For more than a week, he has worked at the beach from early morning until sunset, alongside other of the city’s cultural elite: four opera soloists, two ballet dancers, two philharmonic musicians and four conservatory professors.

As they worked, they sang, pausing several times a day to sing the triumphal verses of the national anthem – “Ukraine is not yet dead, nor its glory and freedom” – in the direction of others filling sandbags to defend the city.

“When our hands got sore, we tried to work a little more,” Mr. Harlamov said. He had a particularly personal reason to contribute.

In a city whose performers bring to the stage works by Gogol, Chekhov and Rossini, the opera house is a rococo masterpiece. It is a place so cherished that, shortly after Soviet troops drove the Nazis from Odesa, Nikita Khrushchev, then a political commissar responsible for Ukraine, flew to the city to inspect the damage. His immediate priority was to see the local Communist Party headquarters and find out “whether the Odesa opera building was still all right,” he wrote in his memoirs. He was relieved to discover that “only one corner of the building had been damaged.”

Volunteers fill sandbags to build barricades.

IGOR TKACHENKO/Reuters

Nearly 80 years later, “it would be a great tragedy if something happened to the theater,” Mr. Harlamov said – this time at the hand of Russian troops. “I would be torn apart if that happened.”

As the singers have bagged sand, Dmitry Milyutin, a seller of luxury perfumes, has poured nearly $35,000 of his own funds into equipping local civilians who have joined Territorial Defense Forces. He has bought half of a store’s supplies of uniforms, 15 tonnes of scrap metal to fashion hedgehog defenses and more than a kilometer of olive-green, Soviet-made fabric to give people sewing bulletproof vests.

On Sunday, he opened his perfume store as well, taking the revenue from what few sales he could make to fund more purchases. Selling fragrances in wartime, he said, is not new. During the Second World War, people continued to buy the Soviet-made Red Moscow perfume.

And the need for more war provisions is great: Every Territorial Defense checkstop needs to be equipped much like a house – from food to plates to toilets.

“My task is to help the Territorial Defense meet the enemy on land,” he said. But, he acknowledged that, “from the skies we are not protected at all. If they use missiles and bombs, we may as well be naked.”

Yet even as Odesa contemplates a coming hail of destruction, Mr. Milyutin took comfort in the city’s “spirit of resistance. Everyone is trying to do everything they can,” he said.

“What’s important is to say that we no longer feel fear,” he added. “That means we have already won.”

Members of the Odessa National Academic Opera and Ballet Theater sing the Ukrainian national anthem while volunteers fill sandbags for use in defensive positions in the city preparing for a Russian attack. President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned that Russia is preparing to bombard Odesa.

1. Search Result - pictures.reuters.com

   https://pictures.reuters.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=2C0FQEY7...

   Volunteers fill sandbags to build barricades during Ukraine-Russia conflict, in the city of Odessa, Ukraine March 6, 2022. REUTERS/Igor Tkachenko REUTERS/Igor Tkachenko 

More than 4,300 detained at 

anti-war protests in Russia

Sun., March 6, 2022, 

STORY: Police detained more than 4,300 people across Russia on Sunday at protests against President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

That's according to an independent protest monitoring group, which said it had documented the detention of at least 4,366 people in 56 different cities across the country.

Video obtained by Reuters showed dozens of protesters in Yekaterinburg being detained on Sunday, and one protester there was shown being beaten with a baton and kicked on the ground by police in riot gear.

The video showed numerous protesters, some elderly, being escorted onto buses by security forces.

Russia's interior ministry said earlier that police had detained around 3,500 people, including 1,700 in Moscow, 750 in St. Petersburg and 1,061 in other cities.

The interior ministry said 5,200 people had taken part in the protests.

Some Russian state-controlled media carried short reports about Sunday's protests but they did not feature high in news bulletins.

The last Russian protests with a similar number of arrests were in January 2021, when thousands demanded the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny after he was arrested upon returning from Germany where he had been recovering from being poisoned with a nerve agent.

Navalny had called for anti-war protests on Sunday across Russia and the rest of the world.

Protesters gathered at Parliament Square in London on Sunday, and outside the White House in Washington D.C., as well as in Mexico City, New Delhi, Istanbul, Budapest, Belgrade and Brussels.

And residents of some Ukrainian towns and cities occupied by Russian forces also took to the streets in protest.

 Russian invasion of Ukraine underscores Putin’s long-held goals

\

Mar 6, 2022 
By — PBS NewsHour Weekend

President Vladimir Putin has long believed that the disintegration of the Soviet Union was a mistake and that Ukraine is not a ‘legitimate country’. Anne Applebaum, staff writer at The Atlantic, joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss what the invasion reveals about Putin’s goals in the region, autocratic attitudes and the world order.

Read the Full Transcript


Hari Sreenivasan:

Well, there's a lot of speculation on what causes Putin to do one thing or another. What can we know about the state of the world and the balance of power from what has already happened, that's not speculative?


Anne Applebaum:

Actually, we know a lot about Putin. We know a lot about how he thinks and we know what his goals are because he's told us and he's told us over and over again over many years. He has told us that he believes the destruction of the Soviet Union was a terrible mistake and a disaster. He's told us that he thinks democracy activism and democracy movements of the kind we've seen in Russia and Ukraine and elsewhere around the world are fake. He thinks they're an element of a tool of Western foreign policy. They're not authentic. And we know that he thinks Ukraine is not a real country, that it's a fake state that needs to be dismantled and it should be part of Russia. And all of those things together should help us understand both what he's doing right now and also what his goals are. His goal is the elimination of the Ukrainian state. His goal is to push back and if he can, to dismantle democracy and democratic activism in his immediate area and then if he can, elsewhere as well. We know that he wants NATO broken up. He wants the European Union broken up. And he wants to retake the territories that Russia, as he sees it, as Russia lost in the early 1990s. So I don't think his goals are that mysterious at all.


Hari Sreenivasan:

But what do you think a level of success would be for Putin or has this already been a success?


Anne Applebaum:

Putin has already said that success for him is the occupation of Ukraine, which in fact means the death of many millions of people because the occupation of Ukraine will require the slaughter of many Ukrainians.


Hari Sreenivasan:

Does he stop at Ukraine?


Anne Applebaum:

I doubt very much that Putin will stop at Ukraine if he manages to conquer Ukraine, which is, of course, not a not a foregone conclusion. In his view, he will continue to see provocations to his occupation from the countries around Ukraine, from Poland, from Romania, from the Baltic states. And he will continue to perceive Western support for Ukraine, you know, in Germany, in France, in Britain and the United States as an ongoing threat to him personally and to his power. So no, I don't think he stops in Ukraine.


Hari Sreenivasan:

Does this empower other, well, dictators or authoritarians?


Anne Applebaum:

Other authoritarians are watching Putin very closely right now. They're watching his reaction to sanctions. They're watching his reaction to NATO, NATO assistance or NATO country rather, assistance to Ukraine. And they're going to watch very carefully how the West deals with this because they're going to take that as a as a sign for how the West would deal with similar assaults and similar attempts to change borders or to occupied territories in the future. So I do think one of the reasons why the Biden administration has been as forthright as it has been about this, about the Russian invasion is that it knows this is an example. It knows that autocracies now work together. They watch one another, they copy one another. And what happens here will will have ramifications all over the world.


Hari Sreenivasan:

Do you see kind of a realignment of global power?


Anne Applebaum:

I don't think what we're seeing right now is so much a realignment of global power as rather a realization that autocracy the autocracies because they often work together are genuinely dangerous to democratic states. So it's, you know, the corruption and kleptocracy in Russia, in China are just confined to Russia and China. They can also infect our societies. They can undermine our political systems and the violence that's encouraged by by a Putin or by a XI and the violence that they use against their own people won't necessarily stay contained inside those countries that eventually it can be turned outwards towards others and maybe even eventually towards the United States or towards our other allies in the world.


Hari Sreenivasan:

The economic sanctions, the raft of different measures in so many countries have been taking and the pressure that's been applied to Russia militarily, there is the opposition inside Ukraine. But we don't have the entire world sending troops on the ground to try to battle in these cities street by street.


Anne Applebaum:

The rationale behind the economic sanctions is that they should force the Russian leadership to change course, that they will be harsh enough this time and they are very harsh this time. They will be harsh enough to make them think twice and withdraw their troops. Whether that will happen and how that will happen, nobody can really say right now. Putin continues to repeat that his goal is to conquer Ukraine. In other words, it's not just about a little bit of territory, it's about changing the regime in Kyiv. He keeps repeating that if he sticks to that as his goal, then it will be very hard for even economic sanctions to make him change. Much depends on what people around him say. Much depends on what conclusions he can draw from the events of the next days and weeks as the Russian economy begins to contract and his businesses leave the country. The hope is that this will help him change his mind. But of course, we can't guarantee that people.


Hari Sreenivasan:

People are watching this war unfold in real time on social media in a way that we haven't experienced before. And I wonder what that does to our perceptions of international institutions like NATO or like a United Nations, because most people watching this just want the killing to stop. And they wonder, Well, why aren't these international organizations able to exert some sort of power?


Anne Applebaum:

In fact, there was a kind of dress rehearsal for this war in Syria. The Syrian war was also possible to follow on social media. People were also tweeting from inside the rubble of buildings and and when they were under attack, there were enormous number of video that was sent out from Syria. Most of it had relatively little impact. It didn't cause international organizations to galvanize. It didn't create any alliances. And I think actually the Russians learned from that or thought they'd learn from it that there would be no Western response this time, either. A lot of things are different this time. The lines for many people are clearer. The story it makes more sense and the way in which the Ukrainians have learned to use social media, I think has galvanized people more than in the past. But yes, I am one of the things that I hope that the social media presence of the Ukrainians will do is remind people of the realities. You know, look, we live in a world in which brutal, vicious countries are seeking to conquer innocent neighbors. And it will make people wonder, So why can't international organizations do something? Maybe there's something wrong with them. Of course, there is something wrong with them, and it's time that we face up to that.


Hari Sreenivasan:

In a recent column, you said that our assumptions about the world were unsustainable. What did you mean by that?


Anne Applebaum:

For 70 years, more than 70 years, we have assumed that it is impossible for a European country to change its borders by force, to invade a neighbor, you know, for a large country to gobble up a small country that that just couldn't happen anymore, that we disinvested that kind of conflict. We haven't disinvented it. You know, actually, Russia has made clear for some years that it believes that kind of conflict is possible. I do hope that this moment causes us to reflect, to rethink our international institutions and to rethink our military arrangements so that we can be prepared for this new world.


Hari Sreenivasan:

Anne Applebaum, thanks so much for joining us.


Anne Applebaum:

Thanks so much.

Japan Inc feels the heat over Russia ties as rivals shun Moscow

Sun, March 6, 2022
By Yuka Obayashi, Maki Shiraki and Yoshifumi Takemoto

TOKYO, March 7 (Reuters) - Japanese firms are under deepening pressure over their ties to Russia and are scrambling to assess their operations, company and government insiders say, after Western rivals halted businesses and condemned Moscow for invading Ukraine.

While environmental, social and governance (ESG) investors have previously targeted Japan Inc for use fossil fuels, scrutiny over Russia could become intense. Executives say privately they are worried about reputational damage, a sign corporate Japan is - however reluctantly - becoming more responsive to pressure on social issues.

Japan's trading houses, commodities giants long seen as quasi-governmental arms integral to Japan's energy supply, have big ties to Russia. Last year Russia was Japan's second-biggest supplier of thermal coal and its fifth-largest of both crude oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG).

"The energy issue has implications for national and public interest, so it has to be discussed properly with the government," said one trading house insider, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity.

"But we also have to think about our corporate value and about how we explain this to our shareholders. It's a difficult position."

Mitsui & Co and Mitsubishi Corp have stakes in the giant Sakhalin-2 LNG project Shell is now exiting. Itochu Corp and Marubeni Corp have invested in the Sakhalin-1 oil project that Exxon Mobil is pulling out of.

Mitsui and Mitsubishi said they would consider the situation, together with the Japanese government and partners. Itochu and Marubeni declined to comment on their plans related to Sakhalin-1.

Japanese firms have largely said they are watching the situation. Those that have halted activity have tended to cite supply-chain disruption rather than human rights.

A senior executive at an automaker said management at his company was holding daily meetings to gauge the impact of financial sanctions and the implication for parts supply.

"We're also discussing reputational risk and how to deal with the news from the point of view of human rights and ESG - of course we're aware of that," said the executive.

"But we can't just immediately decide we're going to pull out because we can't tell how long the Ukraine crisis will continue."

Japanese firms typically do not face the same level of scrutiny from shareholders, customers, regulators and even their own employees that Western companies now confront, said Jana Jevcakova, the international head of ESG at shareholder services firm Morrow Sodali.

"Most Japanese companies still don't have a majority of international institutional investors. Those that do will very shortly, or already are, feel the pressure."

RELIANT ON RUSSIA

A manufacturing executive said his company felt a responsibility to local staff in Russia but was also concerned about the risk of saying nothing.

"Japanese companies have been slow to react. Too slow. And I can't agree with that," he said. "If we keep quiet and just continue manufacturing and selling, we will likely face a risk to our reputation."

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has unveiled steps to help cushion the blow from higher oil prices, but it is unclear what the government will do about broader dependence on Russia. Japan's imports from Russia totalled around $11 billion in 2020.

Government officials say privately Japan cannot just walk away from Russian energy, even as they acknowledge the peril.

"If Japan remains invested in Russia, that itself runs the risk of drawing criticism" should the conflict be prolonged, said an official close to Kishida.

In a moment of rare outspokenness for the leader of a state-owned lender, the head of the Japan Bank for International Cooperation said last week that "it would not be right" for companies to stick to business as usual in Russia. Toyota Motor Corp and Nissan Motor Co have stopped exports to Russia, citing logistics issues, with Toyota halting local production.

Nissan, Mazda Motor Corp and Mitsubishi Motors Corp are all likely to stop local production when parts inventories run out, they say.

Japan's most prominent companies will likely feel more heat as Western investors themselves pare back ties to Russia.

"We believe good corporate citizenship includes support of governmental sanctions, as well as closing down activities that might fall outside the current sanctions," said Anders Schelde, chief investment officer at Danish pension fund AkademikerPension, which has $21.3 billion of assets under management and $342 million exposure to Japanese equities.

"From a financial point of view this might mean companies suffer short-term losses, but given the long-term stigmatisation of Russia that is likely, the long-term cost will not change much." (Reporting by Yoshifumi Takemoto, Yuka Obayashi and Maki Shiraki; Additional reporting by Nobuhiro Kubo and David Dolan; Editing by William Mallard)